Diver UK – July 2019

divErNEt.com 13 divEr

A MUSEUM THAThas been given

ownership of passenger liner RMS

Lusitaniahas called on the Irish

government to make it easier for

licensed divers to recover artefacts

from the famous shipwreck.

Greg Bemis, the wreck’s longtime

US owner, officially presented it to the

Old Head of Kinsale Museum in

Ireland on 7 May – 104 years to the

day after the Cunard transatlantic

liner was sunk by a U-boat.

The 240m Lusitania, the world’s

biggest ship at the time, had left

New York and was on her approach to

Liverpool when she was torpedoed by

U-20in 1915.

Mystery remains about the exact

cause of a secondary explosion that

occurred seconds after the torpedo

struck the hull, but within 18 minutes

the ship had sunk. There were 761

survivors, but the sinking cost 1198

lives, a tragedy that turned global

public opinion against Germany.

The wreck lies on its starboard side

at a depth of 91m, some 11 miles off

Kinsale lighthouse. It is a war grave

protected by an Underwater Heritage

Order under Ireland’s National

Monuments Acts.

Venture capitalist Bemis has owned

the wreck and licensed diving at the

site since the mid-1960s, intent on

proving the cause of the second

explosion, which he believes to have

resulted from the neutral passenger

ship carrying ammunition.

He has already presented a number

of recovered artefacts to the non-

profit museum, which opened four

years ago. The main telegraph was

brought up by diver Eoin McGarry in

2017, after another telegraph and

pedestal had been recovered the

previous year.

Also in 2017 the museum opened a

Lusitaniamemorial garden, and it now

plans to build a “full-scale” museum to

commemorate the wreck.

Con Hayes from the museum told

RTE that the Lusitaniawas in some

ways a “forgotten ship,” despite being

arguably more important historically

than the Titanic,which sank three

years earlier. He hoped that Ireland’s

government would consider relaxing

the strict rules on diving the wreck for

research, and for recovering artefacts.

The bequest takes effect either

when the museum has been built,

on the death of Bemis, or when he

writes a letter to execute it. The multi-

millionaire told RTE that it was

“embarrassing” to consider how much

money he had spent on the Lusitania.

“I’m going to be 91 at the end of

this month,” he said, “and it’s about

time I have new people responsible

for carrying on the research and the

exploration and the recovery of

artefacts for the museum.” 

Lusitania

owner gifts

liner wreck

to museum

CAVE-DIVERShave discovered the

skulls and bones of extinct bears and

wolf-like animals in Mexico’s Yucatan

peninsula – and the find has been

described as ground-breaking by

palaeontologists.

Expert Blaine Schubert of East

Tennessee State University called in

professional divers to help his team

recover the fossilised remains from

the Hoyo Negro (Black Hole) cave,

a bell-shaped flooded pit some 60m

across and 55m below sea level.

The cave marks the intersection

point of three passages, creating a

natural trap for animals. Melting

glacier water flooding the cave after

their deaths would have helped to

preserve their bones.

The divers found fossils from seven

individual bears of the species

Arctotherium wingei, which was

related to the prehistoric short-faced

bear, thought to be the biggest ever

to have lived. Collagen preserved in

a tooth enabled the team to date the

remains to about 11,000 years ago, at

the end of the Pleistocene period.

Also found were fossils from another

extinct large carnivorous mammal,

the wolf-like Protocyon troglodytes.

A number of prehistoric animal and

also human skeletal discoveries have

been made in the Hoyo Negro caves

over the past 12 years, dating back as

much as 40,000 years, but the latest

find is particularly significant for

palaeontologists.

Neither species had been known

to exist north of South America before

the expedition. Because of their

tropical climates Central America and

south-eastern Mexico have a poor

fossil record from the prehistoric

event termed “the Great American

Biotic Interchange”.

This occurred after the Panama

isthmus rose and created a land

bridge between North and South

America about 3 million years ago,

enabling migrations in both

directions. Both the mammals found

appeared to be descended from

North American species that had long

before moved south – but then

migrated back north.

The discovery, which has

expanded their known distribution

more than 1200 miles north of South

America, is described in Royal Society

Biology Letters. 

Divers find extinct animals in Black Hole

A 1907 painting of theLusitania by Norman Wilkinson.

Recovering the cranium of an extinct bear.

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